The Himalayas are unpredictable. But countries are building there like never before

By Simone McCarthy, CNN

Beijing (CNN) — Deadly flooding along the China-Nepal border has put a sharp spotlight on how risks from natural disasters in the Himalayas are growing, at the same time that countries in the region are rapidly building out their high-altitude infrastructure footprints.

There’s no indication that the latest disaster, which has killed more than 600 people and left around 2,500 more missing on both sides of the border, was linked to manmade development.

But the devastation could be a reality check for governments driving a boom in dams, tunnels, highways, railways and bridges across the Himalayas as they aim to harness the region’s vast hydropower potential and resources –– and fortify their borders there.

No country has marshaled those efforts like China, where the government sees Tibet, and its Himalayan borderlands, as critical to its national and energy security.

Beijing aims to transform the region into a high-altitude green energy powerhouse, with projects that include a $168 billion megadam, currently under construction, that could stretch the limits of what human engineering has achieved.

And it’s not just China. India, and to a lesser extent Nepal, have been on an infrastructure-building spree in recent years, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into developments in a part of the world that is acutely vulnerable to earthquakes, natural hazards and climate change.

On Wednesday morning, those vulnerabilities became devastatingly clear when part of a glacier broke off of a mountain, triggering a powerful landslide and unleashing a torrent of water that engulfed buildings and wiped out villages, roads, bridges and hydropower stations, with an as-yet-unknown total cost to human life.

Rescue efforts on both sides have been perilous due to the threat of secondary disasters like flooding and landslides from barrier lakes that formed from debris.

A meeting of China’s ruling Communist Party elite led by leader Xi Jinping on Friday emphasized the “enormous challenges to rescue and emergency response efforts” due to “numerous glaciers, glacial lakes, and potential geological hazards” and variable weather.

Despite those signals, whether or not the catastrophe becomes a wake-up call for Himalayan nations with big infrastructure dreams remains an open question. Experts say the severity of the event and its positioning on an international border should make state planners think more carefully about how they design, situate and scale projects in the region –– and spark regional discussion about shared risk monitoring systems.

That’s especially as climate change makes natural disasters more extreme and less predictable.

“We’re getting ‘100 year floods’ every five to 10 years… the climate risks are evolving faster than our ability to shift the margins on what we think are the horizons of safety,” said Austin Lord, a senior fellow in the Energy, Water, and Sustainability Program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

“With so many unknowns, if we don’t start working on them together then we won’t make any progress, and we’ll just be overwhelmed again next time,” he said.

Himalayan build-out

The Himalayan landmass rises from shifting fault lines and is sliced by mighty rivers that are fed by glaciers. Millions of people across the floodplains of the Indian subcontinent depend on the water that flows downstream.

It’s one of the most ecologically and seismically sensitive regions in the world, but the potential to tame its rivers into major hydropower projects has long enticed engineers.

Chinese advances in dam-building technology in recent years and a race to electrify with clean energy and cut off coal –– as well as a simmering, high-altitude China-India border feud –– have driven change in the region.

“The mountains got reframed from being what (the states) saw as a backwater or a place of potential ethnic instability… into being a resource,” said Ruth Gamble, an environmental, cultural and climate historian of Tibet at La Trobe University in Australia.

“It’s about hydropower but there’s also minerals and tourism,” she said, adding that “there’s (also) a military-industrial complex happening… and there’s a lot of infrastructure associated with that as well.”

Beijing is building out massive, ultra-high-voltage power transmission lines to carry clean energy from Tibetan hydropower stations and sprawling solar and wind farms to its energy-hungry eastern seaboard. It’s also long used development to assert its control over life in the Tibetan region since 1959, following a failed uprising under the 14th Dalai Lama that resulted in his exile to India.

China’s new megadam project on Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo river, which broke ground last July, is one of what researchers say are dozens of hydropower projects across Tibet. The project is expected to generate more electricity than any other in the world, leveraging a 2,000-meter altitude drop by blasting tunnels through a mountain.

China has also been building out new villages and infrastructure along disputed borders as part of efforts to project power, and enable its military to mobilize more quickly. Chinese and Indian soldiers fought a deadly skirmish along their contested Himalayan border as recently as 2020.

Meanwhile, India’s largest state-backed hydropower firm is pushing forward its own high-altitude hydropower megaproject –– a 11,200-megawatt dam, downstream from China’s. In recent years, New Delhi has debuted ambitious new tunnels and railways cutting through mountain passes that too could enable Himalayan deployment of military and other resources.

Nepal has, meantime, also been increasing hydropower buildout along Himalayan rivers, at times with financing from its two larger neighbors as they compete for influence.

Demands for electricity with the development of AI could see efforts to harness the region’s rivers intensify, spurring more infrastructure build-out.

Chinese engineers are widely seen as among the best in the world, making advanced efforts to incorporate mitigation features and surveillance.

But even still, experts say the realities of construction –– blasting through rock with dynamite, pouring concrete into natural landforms and storing water in reservoirs –– could have unintended effects.

Landslides, debris flows and glacial lake outburst floods are all features of the area that are becoming more unpredictable with climate change. They also have the potential to put people nearby at risk or damage infrastructure if a project can’t cope.

This week, Nepal saw more than 430 megawatts of power –– enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes –– knocked offline after 12 dams were hit by the surge of floodwaters. There was also damage to other under-construction projects, estimated to account for another 470 megawatts of capacity, according to Nepal’s Ministry for Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation.

Future risks

As news of Wednesday’s disaster along the border spread, so did rumors that the incident was the result of a dam burst on China’s side of border. The theory, which has no factual basis, underscored how such events can fan mistrust along national lines in the region.

China’s Embassy in Nepal responded with a post on X calling the accusations, and others that it didn’t send out warnings early enough, “fake news.”

“Accusation helps nothing… cooperation save lives,” the post said.

Chinese leader Xi on Friday said in a message to Nepali President Ram Chandra Poudel that his country was ready to “actively assist Nepal in its rescue efforts.”

The two sides were also in touch on monitoring a barrier lake that risks flooding and imperiling rescue workers. Nepal does not have direct access to the area to conduct its own real-time monitoring, but updates were being passed between authorities on both sides as well as between researchers, CNN reported earlier.

China has faced past criticism for not sharing data and design information with India on its Yarlung Tsangpo megadam project. It’s also widely understood to have suspended water flow data on transboundary rivers for a period of time in the wake of a 2017 border standoff. Beijing defends its data transparency.

During regular border talks in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese and Indian officials pledged to maintain communication on hydrological data sharing and said they would hold the next of their roughly biennial meetings on transboundary rivers next month.

Experts say that as the region continues to be a hotspot for infrastructure build-out, countries need to not only design projects that are at an appropriate scale and account for complex natural disasters, but do more to build systems together to regularly share data and monitor early-warning signs –– especially as climate change compounds risks.

“There’s a hubris of the future in the sense that (we think the) future is going to be the same as the present,” said Gamble in Australia. But due to climate change, “what we are moving into is not something that we know.”

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